I was midway through antibiotics, so I hope to goodness not to have given the crud to anybody, but this was the last day for the exhibit: they had brought even a half dozen of the ash-casted citizens from Pompeii, as well as small artifacts ranging from jewelry to plumbing parts, valves, sculptures, wall paintings—just a wonderful tour first of the everyday life in one of Rome’s bawdier cities (it was a resort town and seaport) and then, upstairs, the eruption event of 79 AD.
Quite the experience. I was glad to see so much accurate historical information (in direct opposition to the nonsense DIscovery channel puts out) —the only thing they got wrong was the notion that the Romans had no word for volcano. They certainly did. Several of them. They called them the Phlegraean Fields, Vesuvius, Aetna, and Strongyle. Each one behaved differently, from poison gas (the Fields) to smokers (Vesuvius) and the bomb throwers (Aetna, etc.) They called the fields a mouth of hell, and the rest they said were the domain of Vulcan, god of fire. SO they didn’t have one word for volcano—they just indicated the one they meant. They didn’t see them as all the same because they weren’t. And aren’t. Educated Romans didn’t really believe there was a literal muscular guy hammering out Jupiter’s lightning bolts at the heart of Aetna. They did believe there was a creative force they called Vulcan that reshaped the earth and threw things and if you were in bad with the gods they might hit you, but they weren’t highly literal in their concept, not really wedded to the idea of an actual divine blacksmith you could talk to. You just tried to keep those force of nature happy with you: the naive part of their belief was that you could jolly the old smith into not having a temper tantrum: keep the gods well-fed and quiet, was their notion.
Off-Topic for Rome and Pompeii, on-topic for science fiction:
Star Trek: Shadows of Tyranny – Episode 1 will première on Sunday, April 5th, 2015-04-05.
I’m one of the regular cast, as Mirror Chekov.
For more information, please see:
ShinyFiction.com Ben’s Blog:
http://shinyfiction.com/blog/?p=81
Shadows of Tyranny:
http://www.shadowsoftyranny.com
Ah yes, this is indeed the same, superb exhibit that was at the Boston Museum of Science several years ago… complete with the opening video breathlessly explaining the Romans had no word for “volcano” and, implied, therefore no idea that Vesuvius would blow (again). I particularly remember enjoying the cooking equipment on display and the hairstyling/lady’s toilette materials… also seeing the frescos.
Glad the two of you enjoyed the exhibit too!
Many of the really interesting exhibits don’t make it out to Hawaii, usually the transportation logistics are a nightmare. Years back, I saw the King Tut exhibit in Chicago, and was lucky enough to have seen Pompeii in situ. Mosaics and frescoes don’t travel well; I’m surprised the museum allowed the castings off site. The castings of the doomed citizens were a little creepy, because while the flesh was long gone, the bones remained behind, and you could see bone fragments where the cast was incomplete or the skeleton had shifted.
Indeed, they brought the less alarming body casts. I felt sad that one of the children had come…taken from the family group where he fell. Hard to know whether the child was a servant or a child of the house, but one felt, rather sentimentally, that it was time he went home. It’s been a long tour. One is an old ‘friend’, one I’ve seen before, the man rising up to face what was coming. Perhaps it was a case of frozen in fright. Or the notion that he was preparing himself to face the oncoming wall of ash. Or just pure scientific curiosity—I mean, if you’re going to go, as well have a good view of the event.
I’ve only ever seen any of this from video documentaries. Also, I think I’m conflating the Minoan/Cretan wall frescoes (young men jumping bulls, boxing, young women with snakes) with the Pompeii site. But at least one documentary covered some of the fallen townsfolk.
That’s the thing: This happened in a very real town, to nearly everyone, every level of society. Wealthy residents and tourists, poor freemen and slaves alike. It’s also a reminder their way of looking at the world was distinctly different from ours…and yet they would think we’re strange, not the other way around.
It also gets me how many things were so similar and how many were so different, a matter of perspective or nuance in their ways of life. (And yet, if we really compare, would a caostal or beach town here be all that different, other than a matter of degree or preferences, differences of opinion, styles, choices? I wonder.) (I live a few hours’ drive from the coast, but haven’t been in a long while.)
I know French and Spanish. I have much more trouble making out spoken Portuguese than I do hearing Italian, and reading either, I can make halfway good guesses. With Latin, I get half a sense of things, but of course the grammatical endings are less clear to me.
If I were plunked down in Roman times, I wonder just how much I’d pick up from hearing Latin, the in-between stage it was in at that time, not yet to “Common Romance,” but no longer “Classical Latin,” closer to “Vulgar Latin.” I get the idea I’d be able to guess partway at it, maybe halfway if I was lucky.
So…those people, the kids, the men and women…the items they used daily, the frescoes, the graffiti, sculpture, art…all meaningful and just slightly out of reach.
I remember thinking how beautiful the jewelry, armbands, necklace, bracelets, must have been when new, on one of the people shown among the documentaries.
Hmm…. Very evocative, CJ, that description of the child, a servant boy or a child from the house/family.
But perhaps he and the man who was looking as it happened…. Would it be appropriately Roman to say they (and the others) get to bear witness, by their visits, to who they were, what their lives were like? Not in the “glory of Rome” sense, but in the more everyday (quotidian) sense, this is how they were, who they were, see them and know the truth of what was Pompeii, Rome, to be Latin? In that sense, at least, they’re showing their truth to generations, to know a little of a few Pompeiian Romans. It seems a noble thing, looked at that way.
I suppose that’s the wonder of history, language, culture, and how history and science fiction intersect. Imagine getting to sit and talk with them, those citizens, walk the streets, shop, do what any tourist would do on vacation.
(That puts me in the mood to reread Lest Darkness Fall, also. And a few people have recommended I read Mary Renault’s books.)
There’s something appealingly brave in meeting it head on, facing down what was coming. Some measure of being at peace or plain stubborn determination. Or curiosity. He might not have thought it was brave, but in some measure, I’d like to think it was.
I’m sure if I were to find myself in Roman or Greek culture, around then, I would get quite a culture shock. (Especially since I don’t speak Greek at all.) But it might be good to see how they live, to rethink some of how I was brought up, or what I’ve learned since.
Hmm. It sounds like, this summer, I need to make some time to visit the Houston Museum of Natural Science again. It’s been way too long, and the museum’s very good. — Not sure how they have the baby mammoth now, but the sculpture of the Ankylosaurus was still right where he’d been, the last time I saw him. 😀
My advise if you want to read something about Roman times is read Plutarch or Tacitus. They are good reads and firsthand even translated is always a blast. My nephew visited Italy ten years ago and had some insights that have stuck with me. Herculaneum also was buried that day in 79 A.D. He found it very serene, less famous and so less visited. Pompeii was funny because the ticket sellers bemoaned the fact that most of the money they were collecting would be going into officials pockets and not the preservation and upkeep of the site. In fact the more interesting parts of Pompeii(like the brothel) were not available to see unless you paid an additional fee for an official tour. The bus drivers for the Vesuvius tours could speak not English except clear unaccented “On Strike” and “50 Euro” to hire a car up the volcano. He had a great time.
The casts from Pompeii were in the Naples National Museum that day. Even in that place he said the figures were so sad and forlorn; it didn’t seem right to have them away from Pompeii even though he knew it was safer for them to be in the museum.
Ahh, so that’s it. No new topics for a week–I was wondering if there were a Con going on. 😉
I have traveled through the Phlegraean Fields several times, usually on a train between Formia and Naples and back again. I was stationed in Gaeta, Italy for 2 years, or at least, that’s where my ship was homeported when we were in port. The Fields don’t fume or reek, the lakes don’t steam, but they are definitely of volcanic origin. Vesuvius is imposing, looming over the city the way it does. I find it somewhat unsettling that people are building on its slopes, only 71 years after its last major eruption. “Hope springs eternal”?
My roommate and I traveled to Pompeii one day for a day trip, just to have something to do, and I found it interesting to walk around the place. Yes, some of the ash-casts are somewhat gruesome, but I believe the capture the terror and panic that the people must have felt when the hot ash was falling.
Now, I wonder if they can get the Karyatids away from the British Museum and give them back to Greece where they belong on the Acropolis……It seemed so wrong that they were gone…..
The Phlegraean Fields were evidently much more active re outgassing in the turn of BC and AD…Vergil reports them as dangerous even to birds flying over them. This does not mean, however, that they will stay harmless—in fact, they’re a supervolcano, like Yellowstone, but one whose specialty was really noxious gases. There was a cave nearby, where a prophetess lived, the Sibyl, (one of several Sibyls of antiquity) who wrote her prophecies on leaves, which skirled madly about the chamber and scrambled themselves whenever a petitioner arrived and opened the door. One assumes he got a handful of leaves and a ‘good luck with that’ from the Sibyl, aka the Pythia.
There are several sites including Delphi where prophetic trance was aided by volcanic fumes, with an allegedly immortal seeress…who probably had successors waiting in the wings. Delphi was one. And Cumae, associated with the Phlegraean Fields.
Cumae is also distinguished by its architecture: triangular doorways, very futuristic or alien looking.
I’m puzzled. I see these in “Recent comments”, but when I go there I can’t seem to find them:
Neco-ji: It was Conspirator, and Tano and Algini were playing. Appare
Neco-ji: Banichi and Jago both had a go at Bren, for different reason
Paul, In order to find which topic a comment is contained, move your cursor over the current comment and leave it there until the flyover field appears, then go to the topic. You should be able to go directly there by double clicking the comment. If it isn’t part of one of the current blog posts you can find continuing topics by looking for the tab above the Wave Without A Shore banner and splash picture. In this case it should be in the “Foreigner Series: Spoiler Alerts: Page 2.” You may have to page back and forth within the topic to find the comment. Be aware that occasionally comments get deleted and for one reason or another can’t be found.
Yes, I know. I did double-click. It takes me to Page 25. I’ve even refreshed the page, still nothing mentioning Banichi in the first sentence, nothing mentioning Tano. I went back to 24 and 23, still nothing.
I have the same experience with this as Paul. Here on CJ’s blog I always get sent to the last comments-page for that post, and then have to page back and scroll looking for it, if it wasn’t added at the end. As most posts have only one or two pages of comments, that’s no trouble, but with the Union-Alliance and Foreigner spoiler pages, there are too many pages too scroll through looking for a comment. I think maybe Neco-ji is reading through the old comments and commenting where they find an interesting discussion to chip in on, but because it’s somewhere in those 25 pages we’re not finding those comments, and thus can’t continue the discussion.
I don’t think it’s a WordPress thing, as clicking on a comment on Jane’s blog always takes me to that specific comment in the page. It’s not a browser thing either, as I have the same experience with both blogs whatever the platform I use (IE, Firefox, iPad, android phone). Maybe it’s something specific to the stylesheet, or whatever they’re called in WordPress, that determines how the blog looks? I like the way the blog looks, and a bit of scrolling to find the newest comments doesn’t matter to me, but I’m a bit sorry to give Neco-ji the impression we aren’t listening to his/her contributions, just because I can’t find them.
Maybe it’s time to start a new Foreigner Spoilers page?
(See Also my reply of March 29th immediately below.)
Neco-ji is a young lady, by the way. ;D
I agree with Paul and Hanneke. — Thinking further on this, the fault, dear readers, lies not in the theme stylesheets, but in the links. (Ow-ow-ow, apologies!) Or in the lookups on the destination pages (or topic thread, the blog post which is the ancestor (parent) of the comments).
The theme (styles) control the presentation, the appearance. (There may be some aspects of blog code in scripts the theme uses, but this is less likely.) The stylesheets themselves do only control the look of the pages.
So it is likely how the links, there in the left-hand sidebar, are composed by WordPress, and then in how WordPress does the lookups on the destination blog post (the page or topic thread, which is the parent of the collection of comments).
Usually, a link within a web page has the general form: my_page.html#my_topic , where the # indicates the start of an ID local to a page (like a heading or sub-section, such as a blog comment or forum reply). Then my_topic is an ID name, an identifier or keyword, for the particular spot, either hand-coded by a person or, in the case of a blog or forum, generated by the software, i.e., WordPress itself.
So what we’re seeing is that WordPress is “dropping the ball” somewhere in composing the link or handing it off to its lookup (internal search within the given blog), or when it tries to follow that link to get to the specific comment.
At some point, it’s not keeping track of the specific reply comment, it either isn’t generating the # and comment identifier, or it it’s missing it among the destination blog entry’s reply comments, which would indicate a possible malformed (incomplete?) identifier.
I don’t know enough about how WordPress works, but that’s the general idea.
This would account for why, as we are all seeing, the link in the left-hand side does not always take us to the specific reply comment, and typically puts us on the most recent screenful (sub-page) of comments to that blog post. So, as they’ve said, we may land at the last page of comments, or the first, or in the middle, but not on the comment which we expected.
I wish I knew how to fix the problem, but I don’t know enough about WordPress to know if there’s somewhere that CJ or Lynn can tell WordPress, in the admin control panel, or in the code itself, to give a fuller, complete link.
It might be that dividing up those pages would help, but this “feels like” a problem affecting the whole blog, rather than specific pages. — And for whatever reason, WordPress is skipping something, either in composing the link or in looking it up, or both, so that it “forgets” where it’s going, other than the blog entry; it forgets which reply comment it was heading toward, supposed to land on.
That may help Lynn in tracking it down.
Heheh, a “Tracker” sort of coding pun. Ouch, ouch! I’ll be good! Hey!
Oh — There is also a format of link that PHP uses that has a “?” question mark in the link, to separate a page from a variable=argument-value pair. This can appear before or after a “#” hash/pound mark. That’s a general syntax, so it doesn’t tell much, but might be another token separator point that would help find what’s going on. — I don’t know PHP, haven’t been studying yet. — Must start!
Please excuse my trip into programmer-speak. It has been a very long time since I coded, and that was in Pascal and C and FORTRAN, back in the day. I do know a little JavaScript, besides the HTML and CSS tagging I do daily. But alas, not PHP yet, or other modern GUI or web programming.
Best Wishes!
BCS: True, this occurs with all the comments, all over the blog. But if a new thread is started for some of the longer posts, it won’t have that many pages to begin with – and right now I’m already scrolling through 3-4 pages looking for those comments, as is Paul, from his comment. So, on a new thread, it would take a while for the new comments on older discussions to get so lost in the back pages that we can’t find them.
On the other hand, fixing the linking problem would take time and brainpower, probably from Jane, and she’s been busy enough I don’t want to ask for anything extra that might land on her plate. I want her to have time to work on her writing!
And as the half-linked comments are only a problem with the comments on older discussions on one of the few very-many-paged posts, I didn’t want to bother her about that.
I really hope she will be able to finish Homecoming Games this year; in the back of my mind I’ve had a sneaky hope it might be done in time to be my summer holiday read, with it being a Saint Nicholas or Christmas present to myself as the more likely option. So please don’t go inventing more stuff for her to do than she is already doing 😉 , even though she is so very good at doing everything, from taxes to ponds and gardens to computerstuff! (At the risk of sounding babyish instead of respectful of the Writer at Work: I’m trying to be real good about not being a distraction on her blog, not talking when she needs to concentrate, so I don’t want to be a trigger here for another kind of distraction 😉 )
Hanneke, it might be Lynn, rather than Jane, to hunt down and fix the problem, but yes, both of them have plenty to do already, without adding more to their plates. I agree, splitting the existing pages or starting new pages might be an easier workaround until they can get to it, if they even want to try to tackle such a bear.
So yes, I don’t want to distract Jane (or Lynn or CJ) from writing and other work. That wouldn’t be fair.
Not too selfish to want to see Jane get to finish her latest book. It’s important to her, artistically and for making a living. Heh. Budget and all, I’m quite in favor of paying some for good books to read! Looking forward to it too!
😀 Hugs.
I think what Paul is referring to is that, sometimes, when one clicks a link from a recent comment and it takes one to the blog post / topic thread,, that it does not always place one at the location of that comment. Instead, it seems to put you in the topic, but not always on the correct page within the comments, and not right on the particular comment.
This seems to be a peculiarity of WordPress, rather than specific to CJC’s blog or any one blog post / page witihin it.
:: Shrugs :: I agree that it’s occasionally a puzzlement, confusing. I’m more accustomed to forum behavior, which lands one right upon the most recent comment, or a particular linked comment within a topic thread.
I wish I had a good solution to offer, but at least Ready’s advice is (ahem) readily helpful. ;D
Also — I did get an English and Latin dual language copy of Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic Wars. I think I’d gotten a couple of other classics (Roman) earlier. But I’ll look up Plutarch and Tacitus, per Mrsseabo’s advice. (Thank you!) … Possibly Ovid and Vergil too. No idea when I’ll get to them, from the teetering towering To Read Stack, but at some point. — My literary education was American and British literature, Beowulf forward, and French lit in survey forward, primarily 18th, 19th, 20th century authors in selections. Only the Bible for ancient literature. No real exposure to the Greeks and Latins or the Dark or Middle Ages until the jumps from Beowulf et al. to Chaucer and forward. And no literary exposure outside of Europe and the Americas, nor much in history either. — Which leaves out quite a lot of time and space on the planet, which I find most unfortunately lacking. (College background: English major, heavy French too, computer science and calculus in there while attempting to switch majors. Probably should’ve listened to my French prof, an eccentric Frenchwoman who tried to convince me to switch to a Foreign Language major. Heh, but I thought I knew better. Hah!) Well, anyway, my academic experience was one of those “non-traditional student” approaches. Heheh. … And yes, I’m still a mutt, hybrid between techie and liberal arts, but that suits me. Only thing I don’t like about liberal arts? Right, it sure doesn’t guarantee the old income. But then, I did know that, going into it. So…. Heh. Puis, c’est la vie dans tous ces nuances, tous ces changements.
The interesting thing about Plutarch and Tacitus is how little politics have changed since those times. Circero is always a great read.. ‘O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?’-first oration against Cataline. When reading Ovid try to figure out what he wrote that so upset Augustus Ceasar that Augustus banished the famous poet in 8 CE. In Eyewitness to History there is a great eye witness account by Pliny the Younger of the eruption that destroyed Pompeii . My husband also did not suffer through a classical education. He is a math major himself. I made him read Plutarch and Tacitus one summer so we argue..discuss things like politics.
I have a dual-language edition of Catullus from UC Press (the softbound version). One of the lines in the catalog description: The verses to his friends are bitchy, funny, and affectionate; those to his enemies are often wonderfully nasty.
I took Latin in college, because of dealing with genealogy. It’s occasionally been handy.
Livy is also very enjoyable and well worth reading. In fact, I think Livy is essential if you really want to understand ancient Rome.
His massive history of Rome is entitled ‘Ab Urbe Condita’ – ‘From the Foundation of the City’. Roman dating was often given as the number of years from the foundation of Rome (or AUC), so the title is like ‘AD’ would be for us.
He wrote the history of Rome from 753 BC to the first century BC. This is Rome as the Romans themselves thought of it, and it is very much NOT the modern or Hollywood idea of Rome.
It’s a story of continual self-sacrifice for the common good, of the pursuit of justice, piety, and right action at all costs, of generosity to enemies, and of absolute refusal to give up, no matter how great the odds.
Livy presents the high ideal and inspiration of Rome, and the spiritual reasons it rose to greatness, as the Romans themselves thought of it. He tells all the little stories that every Roman child knew, as well as the history of the great conficts, internal and external, that made Rome what it was.
There are several translations floating around the internet, but most are not very good quality at all. I recommend the Penguin Classics translation by Aubrey De Selincourt as the most readable. Here’s the first volume on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Early-History-Rome-Penguin-Classics-ebook/dp/B00358VHOM
And here’s the start of Livy’s book:
The task of writing a history of our nation from Rome’s earliest days fills me, I confess, with some misgiving, and even were I confident in the value of my work, I should hesitate to say so. I am aware that for historians to make extravagant claims is, and always has been, all too common: every writer on history tends to look down his nose at his less cultivated predecessors, happily persuaded that he will better them in point of style, or bring new facts to light. But however that may be, I shall find satisfaction in contributing – not, I hope, ignobly – to the labour of putting on record the story of the greatest nation in the world. Countless others have written on this theme and it may be that I shall pass unnoticed amongst them; if so, I must comfort myself with the greatness and splendour of my rivals, whose work will rob my own of recognition.
My task, moreover, is an immensely laborious one. I shall have to go back more than seven hundred years, and trace my story from its small beginnings up to these recent times when its ramifications are so vast that any adequate treatment is hardly possible. I am aware, too, that most readers will take less pleasure in my account of how Rome began and in her early history; they will wish to hurry on to more modern times and to read of the period, already a long one, in which the might of an imperial people is beginning to work its own ruin. My own feeling is different; I shall find antiquity a rewarding study, if only because, while I am absorbed in it, I shall be able to turn my eyes from the troubles which for so long have tormented the modern world, and to write without any of that over–anxious consideration which may well plague a writer on contemporary life, even if it does not lead him to conceal the truth.
Events before Rome was born or thought of have come to us in old tales with more of the charm of poetry than of a sound historical record, and such traditions I propose neither to affirm nor refute. There is no reason, I feel, to object when antiquity draws no hard line between the human and the supernatural: it adds dignity to the past, and, if any nation deserves the privilege of claiming a divine ancestry, that nation is our own; and so great is the glory won by the Roman people in their wars that, when they declare that Mars himself was their first parent and father of the man who founded their city, all the nations of the world might well allow the claim as readily as they accept Rome’s imperial dominion.
These, however, are comparatively trivial matters and I set little store by them. I invite the reader’s attention to the much more serious consideration of the kind of lives our ancestors lived, of who were the men, and what the means both in politics and war by which Rome’s power was first acquired and subsequently expanded; I would then have him trace the process of our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.
The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.
I hope my passion for Rome’s past has not impaired my judgement; for I do honestly believe that no country has ever been greater or purer than ours or richer in good citizens and noble deeds; none has been free for so many generations from the vices of avarice and luxury; nowhere have thrift and plain living been for so long held in such esteem. Indeed, poverty, with us, went hand in hand with contentment. Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self–indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be, if I may so put it, in love with death both individual and collective.
(But the golden age of Rome still lay far ahead, and the fall of Rome was still five centuries in the future!)
Bad enough to put the remains in a museum, but to send them around the world on display. These were people – alive. They lived, loved, and died horribly.
I am sure that we would all be offended if it was proposed to stuff Ms. Cherryh after her demise and put her on display.
The Egyptians didn’t seem to have a problem sending King Tut’s sarcophagus around the world…..
Well, as an archaeologist by training, I wouldn’t complain too much, as long as I looked good and they told a good story. It’s a strange thing, to handle ancient bones—you begin to know the person and feel emotional about the individual the world has long since forgotten, so that, in the Egyptian view of the world—they believed that a soul lived as long as someone spoke or thought of its name or as long as an image existed anywhere—in the Egyptian way of thinking, sort of, I’m in touch with this person. I wonder about him, I have human sympathy for him, and I feel for him as no one has in a long, long time. So in a sense—for me—he’s gained a few more moments in the sun, and somebody, even in the remote future, cares about him.
The old Romans and their neighbors had somewhat the same feeling. They built their family tombs along the highway south, put resting-benches outside, and inscribed them with wishes for someone to rest a bit and be sociable. “Traveler, pause a moment and read. My name was Claudia. I kept house…”
The thing they least wanted was to be alone.
It varies, culture to culture. But they believed their spirits would hover round their family and whoever thought of them, and some in later times hoped they would be reborn and have another go at the world.
One interesting thing about Pompeii is that there are still large unexcavated areas. So plenty of discoveries can still be made in the future. For the moment the Italian authorities have decided that funds are better spent conserving the current excavations, which continue to deteriorate, rather than starting on new areas.
The best book on Pompeii is still Mary Beard’s Fires of Vesuvius. Packed with interesting, up-to-date information and plain common sense.
It seems to be a frequent occupational hazard of being a poet, philosopher, or writer, that they are often banished or otherwise gotten rid of, just because they said something that some ruler found a bit too telling and discomforting. Heh.
—–
I’ll get the Penguin Classics book by Livy and see about the others, probably next month. Thanks, both!
—–
The discussion of the afterlife reminds me of Diane Duane’s The Wounded Sky, a Star Trek novel. Her concept of the alien entity there reminds me of the (later) Bajoran Wormhole Aliens / Prophets, particularly in the DS9 pilot episode. There are elements in that of both Judaeo-Christian thought and Hindu or Buddhist thought, of bits of a higher-order being separating and rejoining, with a lack of perception of linear time, so everything is in the now. The book is available in ebook these days, and in old/reprint editions of the paperback.
I’m still finding that discussion of the Pompeii residents compelling and evocative. I’m not sure I have a documentary video somewhere saved.
As “foreign” as they’d be to us and we’d be to them, in ideas, beliefs, from thousands of years ago, yet there’s so much in common still.
That inscription quote, asking passers-by to sit, read, and chat a while with the shade of a woman who kept house, among other things, so she wouldn’t be lonely in the afterlife … sounds much friendlier than the more foreboding things from some other beliefs.
—–
A while back, I did a littlle reading, wondering how much was known about Europe before written history, before the rise of Greece, Rome, and others that have modern descendants. That led to the Wiki page on the Bronze Age. I was very surprised to find that essentially every culture we know about started in the Bronze Age. That we don’t know much if anything about what people and tribes there were in Europe, for instance, before the Indo-Europeans spread out; or other ancient world cultures across the globe: they all began in the Bronze Age. — And yet, there were people then who spoke languages we know nothing about, and have few artifacts from any of those places and peoples, across the planet. No great disaster, simply time and technology and what could last that long. Tens of thousands of years, past any and all written records from any culture we know. Did they invent things, but they weren’t carried forward, not enough other infrastructure or ways to pass on the skills? Beliefs, words, customs, all the things of daily life. They’re back there, somewhere. Unless we find something truly unexpected, who any of those people were, what they thought, what they did, are all guesses. Interesting times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Vesuvius#The_Two_Plinys
“The only surviving eyewitness account of the [79 AD] event consists of two letters by Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus. Pliny the Younger describes, amongst other things, the last days in the life of his uncle, Pliny the Elder. Observing the first volcanic activity from Misenum across the Bay of Naples from the volcano, approximately 35 kilometres (22 mi), the elder Pliny launched a rescue fleet and went himself to the rescue of a personal friend. His nephew declined to join the party. One of the nephew’s letters relates what he could discover from witnesses of his uncle’s experiences. In a second letter the younger Pliny details his own observations after the departure of his uncle.”
One footnote: the Discovery Channel,and unfortunately this exhibit, have stated that the Romans had no word for volcano and therefore really didn’t understand.
I challenge you to find an English word for ‘solar flare’, ‘catalytic converter’ and ‘tanning booth,’ in the same way. 🙂 Think about it.
Well, not necessarily surprising about the Discovery Channel, but the exhibit? IIRC, the ancient Greeks believed Haephestus kept his forge in Mt. Etna, and that was transferred to the Romans with Vulcan’s forge in Etna. Here’s a very large, very active volcano about 150 miles south of Rome and they didn’t have a word for it? I find that hard to believe. Weren’t the Romans pretty finicky about cataloging things, giving them names, sorting them out in some semblance of a pattern that they understood, or thought they understood?
Similarly, the French don’t ~seem~ to have a word for a computer. It’s still officially a “machine à calculer” (a calculating machine or calculating engine). But a parking lot is “le parking!” Heh, so a fixed expression might be harder to pin down by later linguistic historians.
English may usually prefer single words or even shorter nicknames (TV, telly), but English uses phrases as fixed expressions too.
So that claim that the Romans would have no word for something they knew about, when they used several terms…the people who wrote the documentaries / informations instruction materials should have known better.
Even when there isn’t a specific word, there are usually phrases or less specific words, if the concept exists at all. But those may be approximations, connotations, associations of various “sizes to fit” the mental blob that is the idea they’re aiming at. — But any language pro, should know that.
I suppose the real problem is, they oversimplified, overstated it, in trying to get across the difference to the general public.
That said, it’s also true there can be large enough differences between concepts in two languages, so that one language doesn’t have a term that another one does, because they think of it so differently. It fits some other class of things entirely. Or there are things that haven’t been invented yet, so there are no words for the concepts. (Orange, for instance, was supposedly not a separate color for the Anglo-Saxons, so they borrowed the Norman French word. Chinese and Japanese used to think of less boundary between blue and green.) (Or any language before the 20th century wouldn’t have had words for concepts in computer technology, aside from a few early attempts, like the Difference Engine.)
Around Pi Day, I read that “pi,” using the letter pi to represent the constant, was a late invention, in the 18th century. Earlier people had the concept, but they didn’t call it that, they used other terms, and they all had different, but surprisingly closer and closer approximations for the value. (Ancient Egypt, Greece, the medieval Arabs, the ancient Hindus, early Chinese, etc., all knew what it was and all worked to get better mathematical approximations.) But they didn’t call it pi until later.
It’s too easy, with only one language, to think other people didn’t have a concept or a word. — And we’ve lost so much of what the ancient world had, due to lost manuscripts and libraries, that it’s risky to claim they didn’t know some concept or have a word for it.
For that matter, there are words we do have in ancient manuscripts that we don’t know the axact original meaning for, or the word’s almost entirely unknown, guessed at. So…there are translation issues. Ahem.
At least here in the Great White North, the French word for computer is “ordinateur”. Dunno what they say en Paris.
I’ve heard dad use ordinateur with his French and Swiss-French collegues too, years ago, so I’d say irts probably pretty common on this side of the Atlantic too. I’ve never heard him use the “machine à calculer” expression unless he was specifically referring to his pocket calculator (which was quite complicated, even running special complex maths/calculating programs from little magnetic programmable strips), never for his general computer. So maybe it’s mostly used for almost-computers that only do mathematic stuff?
They had several words for volcano, namely Aetna Mons, Strongyle (Stromboli), Vesuvius, and Campi Phlegraei. Each behaves differently. But if you said one, Romans would know it was a very different sort of problem. We haven’t found a document in which they had a term for all collectively, but they certainly knew what they were—had apparently hiked as close as safe to the summit and there’s one writing the compares what they found there, theorizing they were also ‘fire cones.’ As I say—what’s the English word for ‘solar flare?’ Latin as well as English put words together to make new expressions. They didn’t have to make up a completely new word. New words grow out of smaller old words.
So, given we definitely have spring here, I guess it’s time to get out of the snowglobe, and in consideration of the current topic, change clothes to this.